


road trip / happy ending

by honey_wheeler



Category: The Office (US)
Genre: F/M, Non-Canon Relationship, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-05
Updated: 2011-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-22 05:58:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/234633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“So why is this car in Cleveland so much better than any car in eastern Pennsylvania?” she asks, once they’re done with the typical road trip squabbles about which highway to take and what music to listen to and you know, it’s a good thing you haven’t turned your left blinker off for twenty minutes, Pam, because even though there’s no place to turn <i>right now</i>, there may be <i>someday</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	road trip / happy ending

**Author's Note:**

> AU during/after Season 5 (I’m pretending any baby shenanigans didn’t happen, and so should we all).

It’s one of her more impulsive decisions. It’s just that she’s not doing anything particularly worthwhile when Ryan texts her and says, “need big favor, will owe you forever.” The idea of Ryan owing her forever is far more appealing than fixing her screen door or figuring out just why the drain in the shower is making that gurgling noise _again_ even though the landlord says it’s fine or thinking for the tenth time that weekend how one of the hardest things about breaking up with your fiancé is adjusting to the lack of on-demand company.

“Do enlighten me on what I’m going to do for you that will indebt you to me for eternity, because I’m intrigued,” she says when Ryan picks up his phone.

“Drive me to Cleveland to pick up a car,” Ryan says without missing a beat. She should ask for an explanation, she should protest, she should tell him he’s out of his mind and that’s not just a favor, that’s an imposition.

Instead she says, “Sure.”

*****

“So why is this car in Cleveland so much better than any car in eastern Pennsylvania?” she asks, once they’re done with the typical road trip squabbles about which highway to take and what music to listen to and you know, it’s a good thing you haven’t turned your left blinker off for twenty minutes, Pam, because even though there’s no place to turn _right now_ , there may be _someday_.

“It’s free,” Ryan says. “And it’s not a shitheap. And I’m tired of having my mom drive me around.”

“And how did you come in to this free non-shitheap?”

“My uncle said I could have it if I came and took it off his hands."

“I see,” she says.

“Thanks again for doing this, by the way. I couldn’t find any last minute flights that didn’t cost more than the car’s worth.”

“No, it’s okay,” she tells him. “I haven’t done this for ages. I love road trips.”

“So how come you don’t go on more of them?”

“Jim,” she shrugs. “He hates them. Though I guess I don’t have him as an excuse anymore.”

“Yeah, what happened there?” Ryan asks. It’s a subject the whole office has been politely avoiding, especially after Jim transferred to Nashua approximately 60 seconds after it happened, which is fine since she isn’t in any hurry to explain. It’s not something that breaks down into easy words and phrases. Everything seems cliché and inadequate. We grew apart. It wasn’t meant to be. We wanted different things. He bought his parents’ house without asking me and I had to look at a clown painting and knotty pine paneling for an entire year and that really takes the shine off a relationship.

“I’m not the same person I was when I said yes,” she finally tells him. It feels true even if it doesn’t quite feel complete. It seems to be enough for Ryan. He shrugs and twists the top off his bottle of soda, offering her a sip first. “Thanks,” she says. She takes the bottle, awkwardly swigs from it while trying to keep her eyes on the road. He accepts the bottle as she passes it back to him. Takes a long gulp that half empties the bottle.

“I like your lipgloss,” he says. She glances over at him, confused. “Your lipgloss,” he says again. “It takes like cherry.” He holds up the bottle, wiggles it at her in explanation. Oh. _Oh_. She must be lonely or horny or _something_ because the idea that he can taste her lipgloss on the rim of the bottle makes her feel short of breath. God, it’s like she’s in junior high all over again.

“I’ll loan it to you,” she says, and waits for her pulse to calm down.

*****

There’s construction on 80. They end up having to take this insane detour just before they hit Ohio, along these little back roads with about five hundred stop signs. They play games to pass the time: 20 Questions. I Have Never. Marry, Fuck, Kill. She learns some interesting things about Ryan. He’s never seen Jaws, for one. He’d fuck Phyllis Diller, for another.

“He’s not going to be up by the time we get there,” Ryan mutters, peering out the window at the rapidly darkening sky. They haven’t even gotten back to the highway yet.

“Who, your uncle?”

“Yeah. He goes to bed at, like, eight o’clock. Shit, I better call him.” He cants his hips up off the seat to get at his cellphone in his back pocket. Why he keeps it in his back pocket, she has no idea. She also has no idea why his hips doing that make her feel so funny.

“Yeah, we’ll come first thing tomorrow,” he’s saying into the phone. “No, we’ll find a hotel. I don’t know. Youngstown or something. What difference does it make? Yes, I’m aware that you hate Holiday Inns. I can’t promise that, no. Well what if it’s the only option? What if we’re exhausted and falling asleep and there’s nothing for miles but a Holiday Inn, will it be okay then? I don’t know what to tell you. I’m hanging up now. No, seriously, Uncle Art, I’m hanging up. I’ll tell her you said so.”

“Tell who you said what?” Pam asks when he hangs up. She should probably pretend she wasn’t eavesdropping, but they’re in a fucking car, it’s not like she had much else to distract her.

“Tell my mother I’m a disappointment to the family.”

“Funny,” Pam says. “You’d think you’d be more of a disappointment for the whole fraud and drug addiction thing instead of for patronizing Holiday Inns.”

“You’d think,” Ryan agrees.

*****

“You’re gonna love this,” Ryan says when he comes back with their room key. It’s a Howard Johnson, not a Holiday Inn. And it looks pretty broken down, to be honest. Pam thinks she can see patio furniture floating in the pool. But the marquee sign promised rooms for $29.99 and they’re both pretty sick of sitting in the car, so anything seems good right now.

“Is this where you tell me they only have one room and it conveniently only has one bed?” she asks.

“No, but I could go back in and ask if they have one of those, if that’s what you’d prefer. Far be it from me to disappoint you.”

“So what is it I’m going to love then?” she asks. She goes to grab her bag from the back seat, but Ryan beats her to it and hefts it over his shoulder with his own. It may be the first chivalrous thing she’s ever seen him do.

“Free pay-per-view.” Ryan swipes the access card through the slot on the door and it opens with a beep. It’s nothing fancy, just a couple of beds with dull flowered bedspreads, a reasonably clean bathroom, a sliding glass door that opens onto a three foot wide strip of concrete in front of a brick wall.

“Home sweet home,” Pam says. She tosses her jacket over the back of a chair. The air conditioner looks like it dates back to the pre-industrial era. She pokes at a few buttons, twists the dial, and it belches and creaks to life, spitting tepid air into the room.

“Mini-baaaar!” Ryan sings. Their bags bounce as he chucks them onto the bed closest to the bathroom. “You find something good to watch, I’ll mix us up a batch of HoJo’s punch.”

“HoJo’s punch?” she asks skeptically.

“It’s a road trip classic, Pam. If you’d finished college, you’d know that.” He busies himself pulling bottles from the little refrigerator, mixing their contents in the ice bucket. She watches for a little while and then she shrugs. At least she’s not bored.

*****

Everything’s fine until they hit the second hour of truth or dare. At first the dares were simple. Lick the top of the dresser. Call the front desk and ask for fifty towels, a funnel, and some Vaseline. Knock the bed against the wall and make moaning noises until the people next door complain. It’s when she dares Ryan to streak around the pool while singing Don’t Stop Believing that things start getting weird.

It’s pretty funny, at first. He sprints across the parking lot and over to the pool, his knees pumping, his arms bent up tight like he’s a T-Rex or something. Lights start flicking on in rooms as he passes, people peering out, parents covering children’s eyes. Pam’s laughing so hard her stomach hurts. Of course, she’d forgotten that once he finished, she’d have a naked Ryan back in the room with her, an ice bucket full of liquor sloshing around in her stomach, and a lot of fluttery feelings in there with it.

He’s breathing hard when he steps into his jeans just inside the door and yanks them up, buttoning the fly with clumsy fingers. She just watches him. There’s not a whole lot else she can do. Except maybe jump him. Which should probably seem like a worse idea than it’s seeming at the moment.

He looks up at her. She realizes her mouth is open and she shuts it with a click of her teeth. Suddenly he’s looking at her like she just told him a secret.

“Truth or dare,” he says. “And you better take a dare after I just showed everyone my junk.”

“Dare,” she agrees, raising her chin a notch.

“I dare you to make out with me,” he says.

She’d love to say she hesitated. If anyone asks her, she’ll probably claim she did. It’s a better story than the truth, which is that she pretty much jumps him. The stubble on his chin scrapes her face. He’s sweaty. He’s a fucking ex-con. She’d love to say that makes a difference, but right now it doesn’t.

“Truth or dare,” she says breathlessly when she pulls away several minutes later. Her hands are curled around the back of his neck, her thumbs brushing his ears. His hands are on her back, fingers dipping below the waistband of her pajamas to press lightly into her skin. He meets her eyes.

“Truth,” he says.

“Why’d you ask me to drive you?” she asks. “Instead of someone else, I mean.”

“Like who?” he asks. His mouth quirks up at one side, just the tiniest kick of his lips.

“Michael would have done it,” she points out. It’s weird to be carrying on a conversation when she can feel his fingers tracing circles on her ass.

"Yeah, because I want to be stuck in a car with Michael for seven hours.” She frowns at him and tugs one of his ears sharply.

“Follow the rules,” she orders. “You have to tell the truth.” He considers her, slips his hands a little farther down.

“Do non-verbal answers count?” His fingers flex with his words. She nods, even though she can feel her face flushing. He kisses her again, slides his tongue between her lips and inside, and walks her towards the bed.

 

 **  
_happy ending_   
**

Ryan’s uncle looks weirdly like a character out of Saturday Night Fever: slicked back hair, gold chains, a brown-and-gold-flowered shirt that looks like someone’s rumpus room wallpaper. He’s waiting for them in the driveway when they pull up.

“I told you that you wouldn’t get here on Saturday,” he says before anything else, even before hello.

“You’re right, Uncle Art,” Ryan says, his face blank.

“You said you could do it, but I knew you couldn’t.” Uncle Art wags his finger in the air. He looks pretty pleased they didn’t get here yesterday. Pam has a feeling Uncle Art likes few things better than being right.

“I should have listened, Uncle Art.”

“That’s your problem, kid, you never listen.”

“I’m sorry, did you say something Uncle Art?” Pam laughs, she can’t help it. Uncle Art doesn’t seem to get it, one way or the other.

“You want me to make you kids some lunch?” he asks. He addresses the question to Pam. From over his shoulder, Pam can see Ryan making gagging motions and shaking his head.

“Oh, that’s okay,” she says. “We need to get on the road to get back. Gotta be at work bright and early tomorrow!” Ryan mimes wiping his forehead.

“So,” Ryan says after his uncle has gone back inside and they’re loitering around on the curb by his new car. Pam’s shrugging her shoulders up to her ears and twisting her toe on the pavement like a teenager waiting for a football player to ask her to Homecoming. It’s ridiculous. Didn’t she used to be a grown-up?

“So,” she repeats after Ryan doesn’t say anything else. This is it. Here’s where it all goes awkward and horrible. Here’s where he immediately stops acknowledging her existence, which is what she always figured he’d do if he ever succeeded on one of the times he’d asked her out before. And which might have had something to do with her turning him down, if she’s honest with herself.

“I bet I can beat you back to that rest area we stopped at yesterday,” he says. She blinks in confusion. That isn’t quite what she was expecting.

“What do I get if I win?” she asks.

“I’ll neck with you in the back of my new car.” He smirks at her. It’s something she would have found annoying as recently as yesterday. Now it’s making her blush

“And what do you get if _you_ win?”

“A blowjob.”

“Ryan!”

“Hey, these are the terms of the bet. Take ‘em or leave ‘em.” She looks at him for a long moment, then looks behind him at the car.

“You think that rust bucket can beat me there?”

“I’m willing to take my chances,” he says. She grins. Then she grabs the keys out of his hands and throws them into the bushes.

“You’re on, Howard,” she says over her shoulder on her way to her car. “Don’t keep me waiting too long.”

*****

It takes them two hours longer to get home than it should. The rest area pitstop was about an hour of that, first for the make-out break in the backseat once he finally got there, then for the long discussion they had with a security guard about how their behavior was inappropriate and how they were lucky he didn’t just call the cops.

“You shouldn’t have parked next to the playground,” she tells him the next time they meet, at a Friendly’s near State College. Or, if she’s being accurate, in the women’s bathroom of a Friendly’s near State College. He’d tried to talk her into the men’s bathroom, saying that it wasn’t as weird for a woman to be in the men’s room as it was for a man to be in the women’s, but she’d stood firm. She’s been in the men’s room at work. Those places are gross.

Of course, the women’s restroom isn’t exactly sterile. She just doesn’t care much when he boosts her up onto the sink and gets his hand under her skirt.

“There weren’t any kids on it at the time,” he points out. He’s watching her closely as he moves his fingers, smiling in triumph when she whimpers or twists, downright grinning when she lets out a shuddering moan and grapples at the hand dryer for balance.

She curses out loud at the knock on the door. She’s so close, _so close_. But she slides down from the sink on wobbly legs and adjusts her skirt as he washes his hands. The last thing they need is to get arrested in a Friendly’s for fucking in the bathroom.

*****

He follows her from State College all the way back to Scranton. He stays right behind her the whole time, even when she tests him by speeding way up, or slowing down to a crawl and refusing to ever get out of the right lane, even though she knows he hates that. It makes her feel better. It’s stupid to take it as a metaphor, she knows it is. She’s just doing it anyway.

He parks at the curb when she pulls into her driveway. She cuts the engine. The car shudders to a stop, hissing and clicking as it cools down. She kind of doesn’t want to get out. It feels like they’ve been existing in a parallel universe for the last 24 hours, one where the normal rules and exceptions don’t apply.

Ryan knocks on her window with his knuckles. She rolls her window down instead of getting out of the car. Getting out of the car feels too final.

“So,” he says. Oh good. This again.

“So,” she replies. She steals a glance over at him. He drapes his forearms over the door, his hands dangling inside the car. One of his pinkies brushes against the side of her breast and she inhales so sharply she chokes on her gum and has to spit it out into a receipt. Ryan waits until she’s done before he leans into the open window and catches her mouth with his. He still tastes like the ice cream they had at Friendly’s before they snuck into the bathroom.

“Would you get out of the car and invite me in already?” he says when he pulls away. She licks her lips.

“Do you want to come in?” she asks.

“Thought you’d never ask.” He grins and opens the car door for her. She leaves her bag in the backseat. She can come get it later.


End file.
